


Jackrabbit

by philosophicnachos



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age - Various Authors, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: (but relatively mild), Brief description of violence, F/M, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-06
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-07-12 15:32:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7111858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philosophicnachos/pseuds/philosophicnachos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She isn’t surprised at herself, just terrified to her bones. Since they became friends, since the Deep Roads, there was already very little that she would not do for Varric Tethras. The two of them against the world – the Champion and her trusty dwarf. When did she slip the last few bits of her heart into his pockets?"<br/>Hawke and Varric stumble toward something that makes sense.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

The roof of the Herald’s Rest late after dinner, muffled song and laughter drifting from inside, and dried elfroot rolled in proper parchment, is perhaps as good a setting as Hawke might have expected for taking the final steps to acceptance of the fact that she’s in love with the author of her biography. The knowledge settles quietly and firmly on her shoulders as she flicks a lick of flame at the joint and takes a breath, which is an ironic twist of the “drunk on love” metaphor that Varric himself would likely appreciate.

She isn’t surprised at herself, just terrified to her bones. Since they became friends, since the Deep Roads, there was already very little that she would not do for Varric Tethras. The two of them against the world – the Champion and her trusty dwarf. When did she slip the last few bits of her heart into his pockets?

“Am I interrupting?” Hawke jumps at Lavellan’s voice, choking on the smoke in her throat and turning to cough her lungs out over the edge of the pub. By the time she looks up with bleary eyes and a sour expression, Lavellan has produced an empty crate, turned it upside down, and made herself comfortable on top of it. “What are you up to?”

Hawke sighs and holds up the elfroot, only half-surprised when Lavellan accepts it immediately. “Using this fine evening to enjoy an internal crisis.”

“Oh, good,” Lavellan says dryly. “Mind if I join you?” She waits only long enough to receive Hawke’s shrug of assent, takes a practiced drag, and continues. “So I’ve got a piece of the Fade in my left hand, I’m about to get dozens of people killed at a Warden fortress, the fate of the world as we know it more or less depends on the smallest of my decisions, and I’ve just lost so much money to Varric that I am frankly embarrassed to admit the particulars.” She sucks in another lungful of elfroot, and adds: “Also, I might be horribly in love with our local Fade expert.”

Hawke laughs helplessly, a little light-headed, and scrapes up enough genuine concern to ask, “Are you okay? Maker’s balls.”

Lavellan appraises her much more seriously than could reasonably be expected from a woman in her state of sobriety, and reaches behind her makeshift seat to offer Hawke an unlabeled bottle of something murky and smelling strongly as though it may have previously belonged to the Iron Bull. “Are you?” Lavellan counters, oddly soft.

For a moment, Hawke is caught in the desire to spill her baggage the way Lavellan had laid down hers. But the Inquisitor’s burdens could not be a secret; responsibility is part of the job description. Lavellan is not here to share hidden woes, she is here because the Champion of Kirkwall understands responsibility, and she understands death, and she understands this war more intimately than anyone ever could. In some ways, Lavellan is cleaning up Hawke’s mess, and the two of them have an unspoken agreement not to talk about it.

This is different, though. Hawke doesn’t need to do anything other than allow self-deprecation to bleed into her smile as she takes a swig of whatever poison Lavellan has scoured up. Lavellan does not ask about the devil that has dragged Hawke up here in the middle of the night with a joint between her fingers, and Hawke offers no empty promises that everything will turn out alright. They sit in companionable silence for a long while, Hawke drinking and Lavellan smoking, and it’s easier to wake up the next morning for them both.

They’re not friends yet, not quite, but when Lavellan suddenly departs to retch behind the bushes, Hawke smoothly makes excuses for her to the visiting Orlesians, and that’s almost the same thing.

* * *

 

Hawke and Varric don’t talk about only three things: the devastation on Hawke’s face when she asked Anders to save her brother in the Deep Roads, Varric’s life with Bianca, and the moment Hawke became the Champion.

The first, because there is no need. Varric had not been Hawke’s friend when he watched her bite back tears and whisper into her brother’s ear, and by the time he cemented himself into her life that moment had been locked away and buried. He has heard her sob Carver’s name at night, the Fade eating away behind her eyelids, but he knows to stay silent. Dwarves may not dream, but everyone knows demons. These demons belong to her alone.

The second, because knowledge is dangerous, and Bianca has been separate from his life for so long that he cannot bring himself to tell those stories. In any case, Hawke has stopped asking. She knows more than anyone else, more than Varric had ever thought he’d be able to tell anyone at all, but she does not know everything. They leave it be.

The third, because the color of Hawke’s blood leaves Varric speechless and wrung-out, his mouth empty. She kills the Arishok and sinks to her knees only a moment later, her staff falling from her hands so that she can press them into her side. She saves the city, defeats the Qunari, becomes the Champion – and the Arishok guts her for it. Her clothes are drenched in seconds, blood thick and dark and relentless. The Templars hold back the crowd while Anders yells and lurches to Hawke’s side, his hands bathed in blue. He heals her desperately for as long as he can, until Fenris and Isabela find a stretcher and load Hawke onto it gingerly.

They send a messenger to Ander’s clinic for supplies and carry her through the streets to the manor as she bleeds and bleeds. Three times Varric thinks she has stopped breathing; no fear demon could compete with the dread in his chest then. Hawke regains consciousness as they round the corner and Anders rushes ahead to prepare her bedroom for his work. Her eyes are an unholy blue as she stares up, bluer than the sky, bluer than the world, and she manages to croak out Varric’s name.

“Hey,” he whispers, reaching for her hand, his heart beating in his ribs like a hammer. “Hey, sweetheart.”

There is a moment as they push through the front door, when Hawke breathes out as though she wants to say something, and Varric leans their foreheads together and ends up tasting the blood on her mouth. It would have been nothing, only an accidental brush of lips, but Hawke shudders and presses up, eyes wide open. Her lips are a messy, warm pressure, tasting of metal and the burnt tang of magic. She gasps his name again – _Varric_ – as though she means to replace the air in his lungs with her own, and Varric cradles her cheeks between his hands and kisses her again.

Hawke lives. Kirkwall crowns her Champion. And Varric gives a bitter prayer of thanks that dreamless sleep protects from nightmares.

* * *

 

There is something in Lavellan’s eyes when she stumbles through the Fade and drags Hawke after her, that tells Varric that she knows. Blood is drying in Hawke’s hair from a cut high on her temple, and she is pale from over-exertion and the magic of the Fade, but she stays upright and awake. Lavellan watches as Hawke stumbles to his side and presses her mouth to his cheek, her breath harsh and irregular against his ear, and neither woman misses the relieved shudder that racks him.

“Inquisitor,” he begins when they are alone. “In the Fade –”

Lavellan looks so young when she smiles at him. “I think it makes me a poor leader if I make decisions based on something as fleeting as emotions, but I would not watch my friends die. And that’s what she is to me, Varric – a friend.” She sighs, resting her chin on her knees. Her tone is gentle, her kindness familiar and dear. “You’re not the only one who loves her. Though,” she adds, kinder still, “I doubt anyone loves her as you do.”

The easiest thing to do is laugh. “I can’t imagine a world where you make a different decision,” Varric tells her honestly. “A world where she’s dead. I can’t…fuck.” Another laugh, and this time Lavellan flinches at the fear in it.

“You should rest, Varric.” She doesn’t meet his eyes. “And maybe talk to Hawke tomorrow.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She catches him looking and holds his gaze, inquisitive. They’ve been dining in uncharacteristic silence, but the kind of quiet that meant peace. “Your eyes are blue, that’s all,” Varric tells her, an honest liar.

Varric sits at Viscount’s Keep for seven months before he finds Hawke at his door. Her traveling cloak is dusty but unbloodied, her staff a familiar curve against her back, and she grins at him as if the world is whole for just a moment. Somehow he manages to say, “Your hair needs a wash,” relief flooding the cavern of his chest; Hawke’s grin turns into something blindingly bright.

“You got a bathtub I can use?” she asks him. “My estate is all dusty. Orana’s on vacation.” And Varric laughs.

Hawke has allowed her hair to grow out past her shoulder blades since they saw each other last, and Varric realizes halfway through dinner that it hasn’t been this long since before Leandra’s death. It should make Hawke look younger, like the woman she was before fate orphaned her, but it makes no real difference. The cut of her jaw is just as sharp, her eyes the same blue that Kirkwall’s sky, in all its steely glory, could never quite match.

She catches him looking and holds his gaze, inquisitive. They’ve been dining in uncharacteristic silence, but the kind of quiet that meant peace. “Your eyes are blue, that’s all,” Varric tells her, an honest liar.

Without missing a beat, Hawke replies, “Bad luck.” And she’s not wrong. They’ve just never – well, it’s never come up.

“No,” Varric says, laughing. “Blue is bad luck. The kind of blue that you’ve got, sweetheart, that’s not just bad luck. That’s a downright curse.” He takes a gulp of wine and watches her grin at him.

“An old dwarven woman outside the Korkari Wilds told me something similar,” she says, like she’s telling an exciting story at the Hanged Man while Isabella deals cards. But there is no Isabella, and no cards, and Hawke hasn’t told Varric where she’s been. It hangs between them for a moment, _the Korkari Wilds_ , and Varric thinks about blood in Hawke’s hair and blood in her mouth (his mouth). The moment shatters. “She said I’d drive people to madness.”

Varric smiles. “She’s not wrong there.” He had thought the same thing himself, when they first met. And Bartrand, too, when they’d discussed it. To the dwarves, there is nothing bigger and more suffocating than the sky. Nothing good can come from someone who carries its color in their eyes.

“You’re an ass,” Hawke says. The affection in her tone is bare, almost raw. Varric feels himself drowning in it. “But at least your wine is excellent. If this is the sort of perks that the Viscount gets, maybe I should have put my name on the list.”

* * *

 

The first time they talk about the Fade is two months later. Hawke’s presence in Kirkwall is still a rumor, though it’s growing. She wears her hair loose and her hood pulled low over her eyes, and anyone who knows her well enough to recognize her gait has the cleverness to keep their mouth shut.

Varric is reading in the armchair in his bedroom, scribbling occasionally in the margins, and when he looks up he finds Hawke with a skewed look on her face, like a painting tilted to hang unevenly on the wall. At his raised eyebrow she says, “I can’t stop dreaming about dying.”

Varric closes his eyes, and sees the Arishok.

“We’re in the Fade,” she continues; “with the Inquisitor. But you’re there with me instead of outside with the Wardens, and it looks like we’re at Kirkwall. Except –” She gives a quick, self-agonizing smile. “Except Bethany is healing me instead of Anders, and you never get me to the estate. We’re on the corner about four houses away, and I just – bleed out.”

“But you don’t bleed out,” Varric says. “You don’t bleed out, Hawke. Fuck.”

When Varric was seventeen years old, traveling outside of Kirkwall for one of the first times, he’d stood at one end of a field of wheat while lighting struck the soil at the other end. He had felt the charge of it in his belly, like coiled electricity. But he knew, still, that he was safe.

That’s what it feels like, kissing Hawke.

He doesn’t realize that he expects the metallic taste of blood until he tastes the muted tartness of the berries she had for breakfast, and when that fades, nothing but her mouth. She digs one hand into his hair and cradles his jaw with the other.

When she murmurs his name against his lips, Varric thinks he might cry.

 _Are you there?_ he wants to ask, the line from a play his mother used to read. _Did I say the light was touching everything?_

“No,” Hawke says, a lifetime later. “No, I don’t.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Varric is mentally quoting Robert Hass, from “July Notebook: The Birds,” The Apple Trees at Olema. It isn't a play, but let's pretend that it is.  
> Thank you very much for reading! Stop by to say [hi](http://philosophicnachos.tumblr.com)

**Author's Note:**

> spoiler alert: Varric does not talk to Hawke tomorrow  
> say [hello](http://philosophicnachos.tumblr.com)!


End file.
